


Returning and Returning

by myhomeistheshire



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27801274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhomeistheshire/pseuds/myhomeistheshire
Summary: Sometimes conversations are easier when you know the other person isn't listening. (Or, Scanlan comes back. And things are...difficult.)
Relationships: Scanlan Shorthalt/Pike Trickfoot
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Returning and Returning

After Scanlan leaves, Pike tells him everything she wishes she’d said before.

Sometimes it’s simple. Some nights she tells him about her day; how long she spent working in the temple, the people she healed, the weather. Sometimes she tells him how much she misses Vox Machina, how much she misses him, and Grog, and feeling like she was making a difference with what she was doing. Some nights she even tells him about how lost she feels, without all of them. What it feels like to be a part of something, and yet feel so...distant from it. She talks and she talks and it helps, sometimes, she thinks. Just a little.

  
  


_Scanlan, I spent all day casting spells around the temple. It’s moving slowly, but you can see the difference. And I enjoy the work. It feels...necessary._

_Scanlan, today I healed a bunch of miners who got caught in a collapse. Most of them survived, but not all of them. I’m trying not to blame myself._

_Scanlan, today I spent twelve hours moving rocks. It’s such a small thing. But it took a lot of work. I’m smaller than most of the people there, but I could lift more than most of them. And I - it’s hard not to think, when you’re spending a lot of time just doing mindless labour. And I’ve been spending so much time trying not to think about you, and Vox Machina, and how alone it feels, going to sleep in my room here and not knowing whether I’ll see any of you when I wake up. And I just...wanted you to know that. That someone misses you. That’s all._

_Scanlan, I’ve decided that I’m going to stop talking to you, because there’s no point and you’ll never hear it and even if you did, I have nothing to say to you._

_You know what, Scanlan? I’m not going to stop talking to you. Because even if you’re a thousand miles away, I need to be able to tell you that sometimes, you’re a piece of shit._

_Scanlan? I’m sorry for calling you a piece of shit. It’s true, but I shouldn’t have said it._

  
  


One night, when it’s been weeks and weeks away from her family, after she spent a full day with broken bodies and heavy hands, when she is particularly feeling the weight of her armor on her shoulders, she puts in the earpiece and _yells_. She tells Scanlan Shorthalt every last thought she had about him leaving, about how much he hurt her and how hard it is without him here, about how much she hates him and how much she -

Well. She tells him _almost_ everything. And when she’s yelled herself hoarse she waits, like she always does. And like always, there is no response.

  
  


And then -

He comes back. And she has nothing left to say to him.

  
  


It never feels like the right time. His apology came too soon, when her feelings still felt as warded as her armor, and after that....well, there’s Vecna to deal with. And then there’s Vax to look out for. And yet, every day she’s reminded of what Vex said; how he could be gone at any moment. How she should say what she feels.

Pike Trickfoot is not a coward. But when she thinks of telling Scanlan how she feels, she thinks she may, perhaps, be acting a little cowardly.

  
  


There is one night; the same day that they fight Vecna and they lose Vax and Grog vanishes into the ether. Where he comes to find her. Where she is too tired for anything but honesty.

They sit for a while next to the fire Pike has created out in the woods, the flames doing little to combat the chill wind splitting against them. Her armor is biting against her skin, but she can’t get herself to take it off - her blood is still spattered across it, from the fight. Probably not just her blood. Probably a little of Kailey’s, and Velora’s, and Gilmore’s, from when she’d pressed her hands against their chests and waited that heartbreak of a moment to see if she could save them.

He sees her looking. “You were incredible, today,” he says, and only Scanlan Shorthalt could make that sound like anything but useless platitudes, right now. Pike scoffs anyways.

“You were, too. You were the reason we were able to kill him, in the end.”

Scanlan is silent for a long moment, fidgeting with his calloused fingers. “Yeah, well. All of us together, and we just fall short of being able to do what really matters, don’t we?”

Pike thinks of her promise to Vax; _if the Raven Queen fucks with you, or hurts you, or doesn’t change you for the better, then she’s going to have to deal with me._ Thinks of how none of her resurrection spells would have been able to bring him back. “I guess we do,” she admits quietly.

“Can I ask you something?” She asks after a long while, when she’s almost forgotten the cold and the fire and the stars. Scanlan looks over at her with a quick flash of curiosity crossing his face before he nods.

“You said you were near Whitestone, for the first few months after you left. Did you ever...hear anything, through your earpiece?”

He gives her a long look before answering, like he’s trying to figure out what she’s really asking. “No,” he finally admits. “I don’t think I was ever close enough to be in range, and even if I had been...I didn’t wear it.”

“Right.” Pike looks back down at the ground, at the slowly-melting snow surrounding the flames. What other answer had she expected? She’d known even as she was talking into the earpiece every night that he wasn’t listening. She didn’t even want him to, really - except that it somehow still hurt a little, hearing it out loud.

“I’m sorry,” Scanlan says, his voice strangely raw. “I know I keep saying it, but...I think I need to. I’m sorry for being such a shithead. I’m sorry for being terrible to you when you did nothing to deserve it.”

Pike shrugs. She wants to brush it off, tell him it was nothing. She wants to scream at him and let him know everything he put her through, in exact detail. Instead she does neither. Just stares at the flames and waits for the feeling to come back to her fingers.

“I talked to you, you know,” she says, finally. After an age and a half of silence. “I knew you wouldn’t hear it. But I just - had so many things I wanted to say.”

She feels him shift beside her. “You could say those things to me now,” he suggests, and she smiles, an exhausted sort of mockery of the expression.

“Could I?” She asks, more to herself than to him. “Sometimes it’s easier, saying things to someone that you can only imagine the response of.”

“You can,” Scanlan says, and he turns to look at her, his gaze intent when she glances up at him. “I know I’ve put you - put everyone - through a lot of shit this year. Whatever you have to say, I can take it.”

“And what if you can’t?” She meets his look with equal intensity. “What if it’s everything you didn’t want to hear, and you decide to leave again? If that’s the end result, I’d rather just skip to that point.”

“ _Pike._ ” Scanlan reaches out to grab her hand, squeezing her fingers with his own. “I’m not going to leave again. Not if you tell me you hate me, not if you’ll never forgive me. Not unless you ask me to.”

She watches him and wishes for the thousandth time that she could tell when he’s lying. Decides to trust him anyways.

“My family came to visit, a while back,” she tells him. His expression shifts into something she can’t decipher, and he nods. “They - well. Everyone was very nice to them. And they were mostly nice back, at first. Told me I had a ‘family curse’ that they had to break. Took us all up to a mountain where they cast the curse out of me and had us fight it, in the flesh. Except it wasn’t in the flesh, of course. Because it was a trick. They just wanted to steal the diamond they needed for the ‘ritual’.” She takes a breath that comes out a little too shaky, and focuses on steadying herself. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. But I took JB in, after that. You haven’t met her yet, but she’s living with me now. We were inseparable as kids, before Wilhand took me in, and I hadn’t seen her since then. She drew the short stick family-wise, but she’s a good kid. Super into books. She’s settling in really nicely, I think.”

“That sounds supremely shitty. Except for JB, of course.” Scanlan sounds hesitant, but his hand remains warm over hers, unflinching. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to meet them, and to...help, with everything.”

“It was. And I am, too.” Pike swallows the lump in her throat. She _had_ wanted him to meet her family, back in the moments before they’d turned out to be every awful expectation she’d had for them. But now part of her is grateful, that he would never see that part of her that she’d tried for so many years to get rid of.

“What happened to the rest of them?” He asks. Pike laughs.

“I gave them all my money,” she replies. “And then I told them that if I ever saw them again, I’d kill them.”

“That seems...apt. Maybe the second half more than the first,” Scanlan comments dryly.

“Yes, well. It seemed like the best way to make certain that they were really out of my life for good.”

The conversation lapses into a comfortable silence, and Pike draws closer to the fire. The armor is freezing now, shards of ice pressing against her skin. She still can’t take it off.

“I missed you, you know?” She tells him before she can regret it, before she can stop herself. Stares straight ahead as she does, so she doesn’t have to see his reaction. “I wasn’t angry because I hated you, I was angry because I spent so long missing you and wishing you were here and trying to have fucking conversations with you in my head. And then you came back, and I didn’t....I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t make nice and pretend you hadn’t left the way you did, and just _hope_ that you would stay this time.”

“I know.” 

“You proposed to me a few months before you left, do you know that?”

Scanlan’s voice is measured. “I do.”

“And - and I know that you weren’t serious and that you took it back after, but -” her voice breaks and she glares harder into the fire. “But you still _proposed_. And then you _left_. And - and you asked me to take care of Kaylie if you died, which of _course_ I would do, but - but all of that, and you still left. And you didn’t come back.”

“I came back,” Scanlan interjects, and Pike raises her eyebrows, finally looking over at him.

“Did you? You came back in disguise, you tried to wipe Vex’s memory when she recognized you - if everything with your plan had worked, were you ever going to tell us you were there? Would you ever have come back as yourself, if we hadn’t forced you?”

His shoulders fall, and for once, he’s the one to look away. “I don’t know. I want to say yes. And Pike...I wanted to tell you. But I was also terrified that I’d - I’d alienated you, that you’d gotten on with your life and never wanted to see me again.”

“So you were a coward.”

He flinches. Meets her gaze. “Yes.”

She nods, slowly. “Alright.”

“Will you tell me one thing?” Scanlan asks, and Pike waits a second, attempting to judge his intent, before nodding. “Have I ruined any chance of you forgiving me?”

She smiles automatically, because here covered in the blood of their friends and their enemies, after everything they’ve been through, there is no other answer. “No,” she replies softly. “No, I think you still have a pretty good shot.”

They sit in stillness. In cold. In the light of the flickering remnants of flame. Pike allows the grief of the day to settle against her, and when she is fully enveloped, she rests.


End file.
